Big Love

The Big Love Finale

/ Jared / Leave a comment

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I totes should have written this post last night right after watching the show because it seemed like I had lots of thoughts then that I can’t remember now, but oh well, I’m lazy and thems the breaks!

I should start by saying that I know that you hate Big Love.  Everyone hates Big Love!  But I was always sort of fond of it.  It was basically a soap opera with high production values, right?  And that’s fun, I think?  It seems that most of the problems people had with it were story-based, and that is completely valid.  Because like 83% of the stories this show chose to introduce and explore were really stupid.  I get it.  But I always saw it as more of a character-driven show than a story-driven show, and while I wasn’t really in love with any of the individual performances, these were some pretty compelling and well-drawn characters, IMHO.  It was always in the Entourage vein of HBO shows, in that it’s really stupid, but I can settle in and distractedly enjoy it every week while I try to get through my Google Reader.  And, unlike Entourage, at least it had a little bit of forward momentum, even if it was stupid forward momentum.  Entourage has, like, backward momentum.  I suspect I’ll miss Big Love a bit.

I should also say that my wife Johanna and I had some conversations as the season built to the finale about the way the show should end, and it mostly ended, in word if not in spirit, exactly how I thought it should.  I wanted Bill to die (BELATED SPOILER ALERT!!1!).  Bill needed to die.  And Bill died.  Also, I wanted to get confirmation that the story was really always about the wives and their relationships with each other, and I got that confirmation.

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OK, all that said, this finale was terrible.

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Television, 2000-2009

/ Jared / 4 Comments

This has been a great decade for television, so much so that the list of my favorite shows of the decade pretty much doubles as the list of my favorite shows of all time.  Other than Seinfeld and the nineties-era Simpsons, I’m struggling to think of a pre-2000 show that would make the cut.  It’s amazing how far television has come as a medium over the past ten years.  Anyway, here they are, not the best, necessarily, but my favorite shows, 2000-2009 (clips when available and appropriate):

30) Sealab 2021 (Adult Swim, 2000-2005)

A bizarre show for a bizarre decade.

(I couldn’t get the embed code from Adult Swim to work for my favorite clip for some reason, so here’s the link. If I can figure it out, I’ll fix it.)

29) Extras (HBO, 2005-2007)

It’s not The Office, obviously, and parts of the series finale were painfully earnest.  But Ricky Gervais (on television, at least) is always worth my time, and about half of the guest stars were hilarious.

28) The “House” Series (Frontier, Colonial, etc.) (PBS, 2000-2006)

It’s almost always entertaining to watch the types of people who sign up for reality television on PBS.  For instance, Michelle Rossi-Vorhees, of Colonial House, is simultaneously attempting to recreate the life of a female pioneer in 1628 while staying true to her 21st-century ideas about feminism and atheism.  In doing so, she basically undoes the premise of the show, but it makes for great drama, and the PBS veneer allows viewers to pretend that it’s not just a higher-class Wife Swap.  Very sad that there hasn’t been a new installment since 2006.

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