maybe I'm just weird
Feb. 15th, 2004 07:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jainaWell, it's 7 am on a Sunday morning, but last night's Mexican food has left my tummy unhappy, so sleep just isn't happening right now. So instead I'll ramble on my livejournal!
Angel's cancellation, and the varying reactions to it, have got me thinking. I'm really not sad at Angel's passing, and in fact I sort of hope no other network picks it up. I lost interest in the show mid-third-season, when they turned Cordelia into a saint, SORASed Connor, and basically just smashed the whole focus of the show. Everything from "Couplet" on just felt so disjointed to me, so "off"-- this wasn't the Angel I'd loved for two and a half seasons. And yes, I know good shows (and characters) should grow and change, or else they stagnate, but these particular changes rendered the show virtually unrecognizable to me. (Don't even get me started on Season 4. Gross and grosser, no hint of Real Cordelia, with the only bright spot being Faith's return and her *amazing* scenes with Wes. Now *that* is chemistry.) This season, I've watched maybe three episodes? That makes me a bad Spike fan, I suppose, but I just wasn't interested in watching him and Angel snipe at each other over Buffy. The 100th was really good, and a great sendoff of a great character, but I'll be shocked if they ever mention Cordy again.
I felt similarly when they announced that Buffy would end after Season 7. "Oh good," I thought, "It's really time. The show's not as good as it used to be." And by the time the S7 finale rolled around, it really felt (to me) more like putting the show and characters out of their misery than anything else. Same thing for Friends, this year-- the show is literally unwatchable. We tried to watch the most recent episode, with Phoebe's wedding, and had to TiVo past just about everything because it was all so incredibly obnoxious. It's been obnoxious for years now, but it's still on the air because the ratings were high. Thank God it's finally ending. Another example-- X-Files. The show continued long past its prime, lost most of its remaining viewers when Duchovny left, trudged on for two more years and went out with barely a whimper. Its cancellation was a relief.
But then there are the people who think no show they like should ever be cancelled. I visit a particular message board that is oriented to a specific fandom, but also has a "general" discussion board where we can talk about anything we want. Naturally, one of the biggest discussion topics is various TV shows. Most of the folks there are pretty upset about Angel's cancellation-- "Oh no, I'm not ready for it to end, what am I going to watch on Wednesdays, sign the petition!" Which is fairly understandable, it's never nice to have the rug pulled from under you mid-season. But the reaction was the same when they announced Buffy ending-- "Nooooo, it can't end! It's not time!" And more amazingly to me? There are still tons of people on that board who are upset about *Friends* ending. After TEN YEARS. After endless rehashing of plots and ruining of characters to the extent that Chandler and Monica are horrid cardboard cutouts of their former selves and Joey and Phoebe are the most three-dimensional people on the show! I know that everyone has different opinions on stuff, and that's what makes life interesting, but-- jeez.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are the people who, like me, have grown unhappy with the way a show is going, but instead of just leaving the show and moving on, they devote tons of energy to bitching about how horrible the show is and how much it all sucks. Yet they're apparently still watching. I don't really understand that. If I'm not enjoying a show, then I watch less and less of it, and if it doesn't improve, then I quit. Sure, I'll rant a fair bit about how things have gone downhill (see above paragraphs) but eventually I'll cut my losses and move on. This is why I'm only a transient soap-opera watcher; I'll watch my one storyline and fast-forward through everything else, and when that one storyline goes to hell, as it inevitably does, then I quit the soap. Yet there are people *coughsalemcriticcough* who now hate their once-beloved show, but instead of regretfully moving on, they continue to put themselves through the hell of watching every episode and the bitching about it in detail on the internet. Why do that? I certainly understand being loyal to a fandom or to a character, but for me, there are limits. I definitely don't drop out of a fandom if I quit the show-- I just sort of create my own personal alternate universe where I get rid of all the stuff I didn't like and read a lot of fanfic that feeds that vision. :)
This is certainly not to say I don't get upset when *I* feel something has been prematurely cancelled. You all heard me rage about Farscape's cancellation a year and a half ago, and not giving shows like Firefly or Earth2 a chance is always a sad thing. So maybe the point of all this is that whenever I feel something, it's perfectly justified, but when other people disagree with me, they're being silly?
Or maybe the point is that I shouldn't write long, rambling livejournal posts just to get my mind off of my insides doing rhythmic gymnastics.
Either way, here's hoping that Alias, my one remaining TV show (well okay, aside from Days and Kim Possible, which don't really count) starts shaping up into something more coherent than we've seen so far this season. And also that we get our promised Sark-heavy ep.
Angel's cancellation, and the varying reactions to it, have got me thinking. I'm really not sad at Angel's passing, and in fact I sort of hope no other network picks it up. I lost interest in the show mid-third-season, when they turned Cordelia into a saint, SORASed Connor, and basically just smashed the whole focus of the show. Everything from "Couplet" on just felt so disjointed to me, so "off"-- this wasn't the Angel I'd loved for two and a half seasons. And yes, I know good shows (and characters) should grow and change, or else they stagnate, but these particular changes rendered the show virtually unrecognizable to me. (Don't even get me started on Season 4. Gross and grosser, no hint of Real Cordelia, with the only bright spot being Faith's return and her *amazing* scenes with Wes. Now *that* is chemistry.) This season, I've watched maybe three episodes? That makes me a bad Spike fan, I suppose, but I just wasn't interested in watching him and Angel snipe at each other over Buffy. The 100th was really good, and a great sendoff of a great character, but I'll be shocked if they ever mention Cordy again.
I felt similarly when they announced that Buffy would end after Season 7. "Oh good," I thought, "It's really time. The show's not as good as it used to be." And by the time the S7 finale rolled around, it really felt (to me) more like putting the show and characters out of their misery than anything else. Same thing for Friends, this year-- the show is literally unwatchable. We tried to watch the most recent episode, with Phoebe's wedding, and had to TiVo past just about everything because it was all so incredibly obnoxious. It's been obnoxious for years now, but it's still on the air because the ratings were high. Thank God it's finally ending. Another example-- X-Files. The show continued long past its prime, lost most of its remaining viewers when Duchovny left, trudged on for two more years and went out with barely a whimper. Its cancellation was a relief.
But then there are the people who think no show they like should ever be cancelled. I visit a particular message board that is oriented to a specific fandom, but also has a "general" discussion board where we can talk about anything we want. Naturally, one of the biggest discussion topics is various TV shows. Most of the folks there are pretty upset about Angel's cancellation-- "Oh no, I'm not ready for it to end, what am I going to watch on Wednesdays, sign the petition!" Which is fairly understandable, it's never nice to have the rug pulled from under you mid-season. But the reaction was the same when they announced Buffy ending-- "Nooooo, it can't end! It's not time!" And more amazingly to me? There are still tons of people on that board who are upset about *Friends* ending. After TEN YEARS. After endless rehashing of plots and ruining of characters to the extent that Chandler and Monica are horrid cardboard cutouts of their former selves and Joey and Phoebe are the most three-dimensional people on the show! I know that everyone has different opinions on stuff, and that's what makes life interesting, but-- jeez.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are the people who, like me, have grown unhappy with the way a show is going, but instead of just leaving the show and moving on, they devote tons of energy to bitching about how horrible the show is and how much it all sucks. Yet they're apparently still watching. I don't really understand that. If I'm not enjoying a show, then I watch less and less of it, and if it doesn't improve, then I quit. Sure, I'll rant a fair bit about how things have gone downhill (see above paragraphs) but eventually I'll cut my losses and move on. This is why I'm only a transient soap-opera watcher; I'll watch my one storyline and fast-forward through everything else, and when that one storyline goes to hell, as it inevitably does, then I quit the soap. Yet there are people *coughsalemcriticcough* who now hate their once-beloved show, but instead of regretfully moving on, they continue to put themselves through the hell of watching every episode and the bitching about it in detail on the internet. Why do that? I certainly understand being loyal to a fandom or to a character, but for me, there are limits. I definitely don't drop out of a fandom if I quit the show-- I just sort of create my own personal alternate universe where I get rid of all the stuff I didn't like and read a lot of fanfic that feeds that vision. :)
This is certainly not to say I don't get upset when *I* feel something has been prematurely cancelled. You all heard me rage about Farscape's cancellation a year and a half ago, and not giving shows like Firefly or Earth2 a chance is always a sad thing. So maybe the point of all this is that whenever I feel something, it's perfectly justified, but when other people disagree with me, they're being silly?
Or maybe the point is that I shouldn't write long, rambling livejournal posts just to get my mind off of my insides doing rhythmic gymnastics.
Either way, here's hoping that Alias, my one remaining TV show (well okay, aside from Days and Kim Possible, which don't really count) starts shaping up into something more coherent than we've seen so far this season. And also that we get our promised Sark-heavy ep.
