As mentioned on the sidebar, one of the sites I occasionally visit – okay, “haunt daily” is defective yeti. Your amiable host at dy is Matthew Baldwin, whose great sense of humour permeates the entire site. He occasionally shares a little bit of his own satirical writing. If you check out the site, be sure to search the archives for the White House Text (Mis)Adventure – a funny bit that combines reference to the old Infocom text adventure games and the current inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. with hilarious results.
Recently, Matthew posted reviews of some DVDs he’d been watching, one of which was Deadwood, a show that I haven’t got around to watching yet – though my brother gave me the box set of the first season last year for Christmas. No, it is not that I did not like the gift, I’ve just been a little busy, okay ? Spouse and I just recently finished watching The Sopranos, – I’d never watched even a single episode until this summer, so you can see that we’re playing a little catch-up here. Anyway, my point is that Deadwood has been on the list, but has remained in the “on deck” pile nonetheless, as a result of some quality material preceding it in priority. Matthew’s review has piqued my interest, though (he promised gunfights and robots, or at least half of those things – which sounds like a can’t miss recipe for entertainment to me) so I will be moving Deadwood to the front of the queue. I left a comment at his site to tell him about one of the other series that has gotten in the way of my Deadwood viewing. Here’s what I wrote:
If you like the mind-bending stuff and episodic serial TV that moves the plot forward, without a doubt, you need to get your hands on a BBC show called Life on Mars. There were only two seasons aired, something like 16 episodes in total, but the brevity of the series and the tightness of its story arc were very purposefully planned by its creators. The basic synopsis of the show is that a Manchester detective (Sam Tyler) investigating a particular crime is involved in a car accident; when he wakes up, he is in 1973. Each episode of the show has elements of a classic cop show plot, with the superadded dimension that the series as a whole is also challenging the viewer to decide (as Sam tries to decide for himself) whether he has actually time-travelled to 1973, has gone mad, or is in a coma and just imagining the events depicted in each episode. Sam is, of course, attempting to figure out how to “return” to his life in current-day Manchester all the while. The writing is absolutely top-notch, with each episode like a loving homage to the cop shows genre in general and 70s cop shows in particular, with the “time travel” question and the changes in social and policing mores permeating the whole cloth of the show and putting an absolutely fresh twist on the formula. The acting is also quite good, and some of the characters (such as Sam Tyler’s 1973 cop boss Gene Hunt) are extremely memorable and entertaining. I know that the basic nutshell explanation (time travelling cop) sounds a little doubtful, but my wife and I absolutely devoured all sixteen episodes and both felt it was the best show we’d ever seen on television. I know that the show was being broadcast on a network called Showtime here in Canada – but I’m pretty sure our “Showtime” is a totally different company than the American “Showtime”. It is also – ahem – possible to locate copies of the show on teh Intarwebs if you are familiar with Bitcomet and torrents.
Suffice to say that the amount of entertainment and plot development that the writers of this show managed to stick into sixteen episodes will make you want to fling everyone involved in the production of Lost into a very deep portion of the ocean.
Meanwhile, I will take your recommendation and finally open up the box of DVDs containing season 1 of Deadwood. Now, how am I going to convince my wife to watch wild-west robot gunfights?