Television Zombies?

Anna Gregoline | April 14, 2005
According to studies, the average American watches television as much as six hours a day. Why do Americans watch so much television?

John E Gunter | April 14, 2005
Low brow mentality.

I think you'll find that figure is a for a particular age bracket. Reason I say that is I think I might watch maybe a total of an hour a day.

Course, now you count how much time I spend on the internet each day and you're looking at about 12 hours give or take.

John

Lori Lancaster | April 14, 2005
[hidden by request]

Kris Weberg | April 14, 2005
Hee hee. I have no cable, and no broadcast. My TV is a machine for occasional DVD watching. I watch about 2-3 hours of TV a week. Tops.

But as John said, the Internet is really my TV.

Amy Austin | April 15, 2005
And, in fact, it's every bit as consuming -- with even more potential for mis-information... so I wouldn't criticize the TV watchers. About the only "superior" qualities that the Net offers over TV are more possibilities of social interaction (as opposed to complete observation) and more intellectually enriching information. But how many of us are really on here for all that much of the latter??? (And what does it say if you're the kind of person who has the TV on the whole while you surf -- for double the mind-numbing pleasure! ;-D)

Scott Hardie | April 15, 2005
To Anna's original question: Because it's fun and it's convenient and it's easy. The high number of hours comes from how hard TV is to turn off: No matter how bored you get with one channel, further entertainment is available within a matter of clicks. Television can never bore you for long, unless you're one of those poor doomed souls trying to find something interesting to watch on a weekend afternoon. Damn you, professional golf!

Some TiVo users swear they can't go back to regular TV. I'm the same way, except for me it's television shows on DVD. I can watch them at my own pace instead of once each week, I get all the commentaries and deleted scenes they can cram into each boxed set, I gain the historical perspective of seeing a series in its entirety, and I'm not bothered by commercials or transparent station logos in the corner of the screen. The price I pay is that I'm forever behind the times, watching shows 5, 10, even 15 years after everybody else has already processed them, and I risk spoilers in the process. This summer I'm going to finish the entire run of "The X Files" after watching seasons sporadically over three years, and I'd love to discuss it with you folks when that time comes, but those of you who watched it have already seen the final episode four years ago, so what could you have to say now? Remember when I tried to start a discussion on "My So-Called Life" last year? My desire to discuss some work of art that I have just finished processing (I would write TMRs of them if I could) outweighs my common sense that nobody cares about a TV show that went off the air years earlier. I'm at a loss.

(Anybody spoils the ending of "The X Files" for me and they get permanently banned from the site. Y'all heard.)

(And yes, this is the second comment I've written in an hour that mentions both "The X Files" and "My So-Called Life." What can I say? Like us all, I'm a victim of my limited perspective on the world.)

John E Gunter | April 15, 2005
But I am superior because I surf the internet, just ask me. :-D

John

Kris Weberg | April 15, 2005
Dave Foster Wallace has an excellent essay on TV in his book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, in which he describes it as "special treat" and notes that a little "special treat" is good now and again, but not a diet of nothing but.

Aaron Shurtleff | April 15, 2005
Scott, I watched the ending of X-Files, and, much like most of the time I watched the show, I couldn't spoil the ending if I wanted to...

Pueblo! There! It's ruined! :P

Personally, I have to agree with the relaxation idea. I get home, I just want to veg out and not think for a while. TV is perfect for not thinking...depending on what you watch! I watch Adult Swim. There's no thinkin' required!

Kris Weberg | April 15, 2005
Trust me when I say that no one will spoil the ending of the X-Files, because you would think we were joking if we actually told you. You really would.

Scott Hardie | December 19, 2005
It took me longer than I expected, but tonight I finally finished all 202 episodes of "The X Files," and at last I get to discuss it with you folks, who finished watching it three years ago with the rest of the world. :-P Major spoilers. Here are a few thoughts on finishing the series and finally reading all the web commentary about it that I've been avoiding all this time:

- The ninth season is nowhere near as bad as I'd heard. It only has a couple of really bad episodes, namely the "Provenance"/"Providence" lame-ass two-parter and "Jump the Shark," the final Lone Gunmen episode. (If you're trying to use the Lone Gunmen for dramatic effect, your screenplay needs a rewrite.) It also has the magnificent "Release" about John Doggett's son: "Closure" it ain't, but it deftly wields Doggett's existing backstory to new effect, and it's the only episode that succeeded in making Brad Follmer seem like a real person instead of a caricature. (I could never figure Follmer out. He seemed like a joke, especially the way Cary Elwes played him, but the characters didn't seem to be in on it. Beats me.) My only real problem with the final season is its continuing reliance on the super-weak "super soldiers" storyline, which kept repeating the same yawn-inducing showdown where the hero fires bullet after bullet into the bad guy but the bad guy keeps marching forwards with a blank expression. It was an old cliché when Robert Patrick himself did it perfectly in "T2," so why do it badly when he's right there to remind you how much better it could be done? Ugh.

- Even worse than that cliché was the formula of the series, especially of the lore episodes: The villain or monster kills somebody in the teaser and does it again before each of the commercial breaks, and in the final act is about to kill Mulder/Scully/Doggett/Reyes before finally being killed/captured. This same dim formula has fueled countless schlocky horror movies, and this series didn't do a great job of keeping it fresh. By my count, 103 of the 202 episodes followed some variation of this formula (at least two murders by the MOTW) and the repetition showed, but the last two seasons finally moved away from it.

- Apparently after the show ended, there was still ambiguity about several key plot elements, something I didn't realize until I went onto the web. How can anyone doubt that Mulder is the father of William? How can anyone doubt that Samantha Mulder died long ago? These seemed like they were explained definitely and repeatedly in the series.

- Holy crap am I glad I watched this entire series. I used to watch it on broadcast in the early nineties, but I was one of the fans who couldn't keep up week to week, and the mythology became so confusing I gave up. Finally Netflix came to the rescue, and I've been able to see every second of the series' run, including deleted scenes so revealing they may as well be canonical. I can't recommend this entire series enough. My advice for watching it is A) avoid spoilers online like the plague (too late if you're reading this! ha!) and B) watch the movie before starting the sixth season, not after finishing the fifth season, that is if you're taking a break between them. Those are the only two things I wish I'd done differently. (On that note: When watching the entire "Star Trek" canon in broadcast order from start to finish, I changed my mind at the last minute and decided to watch TNG as a complete series before starting DS9. Big mistake: I had no idea how integrated they were, with the same guest stars in the same week and several crossover episodes and interrelated mythologies like DS9 concepts appearing unexplained on TNG. I wish I could go back and watch them right.)

- Annabeth Gish can't act worth shit.

Ten best episodes:
10) "The Gift" (s8e11): Duchovny's first return to the series after leaving, and the show does a brilliant job of turning his absence into Doggett's obsession, fueled by Doggett's latent feelings for Scully, and this is all kept 100% implicit. This is one of the moodiest episodes of the series, in which you can agree with the main character's emotional leaps of faith because the show makes you feel what he feels. Robert Patrick rules.
9) "E.B.E." (s1e17): The only stellar episode of the first (and worst) season has Deep Throat giving Mulder a hint of how deep the conspiracy goes. It sends a chill up your spine, and it's the first episode to really ramp up the adrenaline. This was the first episode, both then and now, when I knew this series was something special.
8) "Leonard Betts" (s4e12): The show doing what it did best: Yucky and scary, yes, but empathetic too. The villain is not a bad person, just a shameful loser like most of us fans. And like the similarly excellent "Red Museum" and "Avatar," it suddenly turned on a dime in its final act, from a lore episode to a mytharc episode, demonstrating that the series was so complex that you could stare at trees for an hour and not even know it's a forest.
7) "Improbable" (s9e13): I must have watched this episode six times before I finally gave up. It's so much fun, and Burt Reynolds is so genial and warm. It's also arguably the only time Reyes seemed to belong on the show and (tied with "Hellbound") the closest we ever got to a Reyes episode, but it's not good because of that. It's good because it's just so endlessly entertaining.
6) "Tithonus" (s6e10): Scully meets a photographer who's been alive for 150 years. There are other good things in this episode, but it's Geoffrey Lewis's masterful performance that sells it. His raspy voice coils around Scully like a snake, pulling her closer as he gradually reveals his sad life story to her. Most fans seem to believe Peter Boyle was the best guest star in the series, but I say it was Lewis, hands down.
5) "Redux" and "Redux II" (s5e01/02): The centerpiece is the five-minute-plus monologue by Michael Kritschgau explaining the history of government UFO conspiracy to Mulder, expertly intercut with newsreel footage both real and fake, but there are other standout elements in this, the best of the series two-parters. There's CSM showing his hand by offering Mulder a job if he quits the FBI. There's Mulder finally nailing an FBI superior for conspiracy. There's Scully's brother finally telling Mulder off for the price he's made the Scully family pay. And there's a lot of humor. This show's season premieres were usually mediocre at best, but this one bucked the trend.
4) "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" (s3e20): Of course, one of the biggest fan favorites. It's one of the most cerebral episodes committed to film and one of the few to be about something other than its own plot. And it's funny as hell, with the alien costumes and the servings of pie and Alex Trebek.
3) "War of the Coprophages" (s3e12): To me, the funniest episode the series every did, and one of its smartest. It doesn't stop riffing on its subject matter, even after it ends with the clichéd explosion, and it features some of the best bickering Mulder and Scully ever did. I'm still waiting for someone to ask me someday what one episode they should watch if they are never going to watch another episode, so that I can tell them "War of the Coprophages."
2) "Closure" (s7e11): Samantha's disappearance had always been the emotional engine of the series, and the writers wisely realized it needed an emotional resolution even after the facts had been revealed. In comes this, the unexpectedly powerful second half of a two-parter, in which Mulder ends his journey of 20 years and we end our journey of 7. The final scene in the moonlit glen, so moving and haunting, is the single best scene in the entire series.
1) "Anasazi" (s2e25): This is it, the moment when the series exploded into something truly great and immortal. For two years it had planted all kinds of seeds about its characters and conspiracies, and "Anasazi" harvested them all for an electrifying season finale, ending with the best of the cliffhangers, Mulder in the burning train car with the alien corpses. The best mytharc episodes transcended themselves by using what had come before to added effect, and this one was the best mytharc episode of all, perhaps the most perfect episode in the whole series, demonstrating the very best "The X Files" could be.

The other best episodes of the series: "3", "One Breath", "Red Museum", "Colony", "Humbug", "Avatar", "Unruhe", "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man", "Tunguska", "El Mundo Gira", "Never Again", "Max", "Elegy", "The Post-Modern Prometheus", "Christmas Carol", "The Red and the Black", "Folie a Deux", "Drive", "Triangle", "Biogenesis", "Millenium", "X-COPS", "all things", "Je Souhaite", "Requiem", "Patience", "Via Negativa", "Per Manum", "Essence", "Underneath", and "Release."

The worst episodes:
3) "Ghost in the Machine" (s1e07): The show tries on the Idiot Plot and discovers it's not a very good fit. Mulder and Scully act like morons to put themselves in peril against one of the lamest MOTWs the show ever invented. Weak.
2) "First Person Shooter" (s7e13): Terrible, despite some good jokes about the male ego. The writers commented that women like Krista Allen don't appear on the show often, and there's a reason: They break the illusion of reality and remind us we're watching an expensive fabricated television show. This was stupid and painful.
1) "Fight Club" (s7e20): Hands down, the absolute worst of the series. "Dreamland" made the show into an idiotic sitcom, but this episode made it into an atrocious Looney-Tunes short. The premise: Kathy Griffin plays a dual role, and every time both of her meet, reality starts violently tearing itself apart from the sheer impossibility of there being two Kathy Griffins in one place. ...Yeah, that pretty much says it all.

Anyway, like I said, I'm sure you've either seen the full run of the show years ago or are never going to bother, to my comments are pointless to everyone but me. Still, I'm glad I watched this groundbreaking series and can finally say I understand its many mysteries. It's been a great ride.

Scott Hardie | December 19, 2005
On further reflection, you guys were right about the final "X Files" episode. Major spoilers.

The finalé was well done and all, but why would Chris Carter focus it on a new revelation about alien invasions instead of resolving more of the existing plotline? The 2012 invasion had been hinted at over the last few seasons so I suppose it's not "new," but it did make the episode feel like a season premiere in which the characters are about to embark on a new crusade, not like a final culmination of their nine years of work. By this time, Carter was already planning for the next feature film to be stand-alone, not related to the series mythology, so it's not like he was setting it up.

If I could rewrite the episode: Mulder would still break into the facility and activate the End Game program (nice reference; see s2e17), but instead of describing the 2012 invasion, I'd have the program be a kill switch that sentences all super soldiers a grisly death. Then, after some demonstration of his telekinesis, Mulder would be discovered over Rohrer's dying body and the episode would continue as it had. Later, in the desert, instead of talking about the 2012 invasion, CSM would explain at last why the soldiers wanted Mulder dead: His onetime abduction altered him in a way that made him and his progeny the only ones who could challenge the soldiers for supremacy of the Earth, and with the soldiers now dead, the hinted-at invasion would never come to pass. Then the episode would end the same way. My way, the Earth would be saved, the plotline would be resolved, and Chris Carter would still get to deliver pretty much the same final episode he had intended.

Scott Horowitz | December 19, 2005
Am I the only sci-fi nut that thought the X-Files was complete crap?

Jackie Mason | December 19, 2005
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | December 20, 2005
Why didn't you like it, Scott? Just wondering.

I sometimes got that feeling too, Jackie, especially in the more free-form mytharc episodes that stayed unresolved because the same storyline would resume five episodes later. Seeing the whole series start-to-finish helped me appreciate the larger arcs and piece together the mysteries myself, but it also helped me see that they were pretty much just making it up as they went, that there was no grand plan. There's nothing wrong with that if you can fake it well, as they did with the Syndicate conspiracy in the first six seasons, but it plays like crap if not, as with the super soldiers in the last three seasons.