Fear of Losing Favorite TV

Probably the original Star Trek series was the first time I fell in love with a TV show in the same way that I was already accustomed, at eleven, to fall in love with books—with my whole entire self in such a fashion that the show and my love for it became a part of who I was. It was also my first encounter with a difficulty that swirls around this kind of love for television that is usually absent from the same powerful feelings toward a particular book. When I love a book this way—when I clutch it to my chest when I’m done reading it, when it stays with me always, when it is in some way me—I get a copy of it to keep forever. Maybe it’s a particularly nice copy and maybe it isn’t, but I have a physical copy that I can set on a shelf and be pretty sure, barring some manner of house-destroying catastrophe, that it will be accessible to me forever. If I need to read Harry’s decision to enter the Forbidden Forest again, I can. If I need to watch David and Alan take on Hoseason’s crew from the captain’s cabin, no problem. If I need to hear Jane tell Rochester that she’s no bird, I have but to take the book down from its place on the shelf and crack it open. And the thing is, getting that book in the first place, with rare exception, is easy. If I have ten or twenty bucks, I can get the thing and have it forever.

Rewatching my favorite moments between Kirk and Spock was a lot harder in 1992, when my only real access to them was through the reruns our local PBS affiliate ran on Saturday nights. I recorded them on VHS—a somewhat cumbersome and anxiety inducing process (what if I set up the recording wrong?!)—but even so I was restricted by which episodes the station chose to air. And keeping those recordings for later viewing was kind of a nightmare. If I recorded them on a slow speed to get as many episodes as possible on one tape, the recording quality was crap and would deteriorate fairly quickly. Record at a faster speed and only two episodes would fit on a tape. Even a show with a pretty short run like TOS still would run to forty VHS tapes to keep all of them. Not exactly tenable, especially if one likes *gasp* more than one TV show enough to want to be able to see it again, just as one likes to read favorite books again.

All this is much easier now, of course. Blu rays take up much less space than VHS tapes, and streaming means that you can “have” a whole show without it taking up any of your space at all. But here’s the thing—that all feels so very, very impermanent. Shows disappear from streaming services all the time, when the copyright agreements between the distributor and the service run out. And a blu ray can break or get scratched or degrade. Or… someday, owning a blu ray player will probably be like owning a VHS player is now—increasingly uncommon and eventually, probably, impossible. Those VHS copies of TOS I recorded nearly thirty years ago are pretty much worthless now. I don’t know how I would watch them, and they are probably nearly unwatchable anyway, having sat around losing little bits of data for decades. But the copy of The Hobbit my dad read to me when I was six is just as readable and just as lovely now as it was then.

It’s too bad, I guess, that we can’t really pass beloved visual media down like we can books, but what really puts a shiver down my spine is the thought of truly losing the ability to re-experience these texts that mean just as much to me as my favorite books do. I feel like so many of them are largely considered ephemeral and of the moment, while to me they are anything but ephemeral. I’m two-thirds of the way through watching Supernatural for the first time, and I know that this is one of my texts now. I’ve fallen so deeply in love with it that it is part of me, just as Jane Eyre, and Kidnapped, and Harry Potter are. I’m watching it on Netflix, but I also bought the blu rays. I’m not trusting that the show will be there ten years from now when I need to revisit it. But are those blu rays any better? Will they work in ten years? If I drop my copy of Jane Eyre in the bath, I’m always going to be able to go get another one. If blu rays don’t exist anymore when I’m sixty, will Warner Brothers have bothered to distribute SPN in whatever way is ubiquitous then? I shudder to think.

What TV shows mean as much to you as your favorite books? Which would you be devasted to no longer be able to watch?

The Best of 2019

Despite my sense that 2019 was just… fine as far as reading (and much else) went, I certainly encountered some things that were worlds better than fine. Here are the books and TV shows that really curled my papers last year.

Supernatural (CW for gore, TV scariness, and religious figures as characters) 

This is the big one, spacerats. Despite the fact that it will certainly be well into (maybe even all the way to the end of) 2020 before I *finish* the show (327 episodes. 327. Whut.), 2019 will always be the year of Supernatural for me because it is the year I fell down that particular rabbit hole. A good friend and former roommate introduced me to the show waaaay back in 2006, we watched the entire first season in, like, two days, and then I was afraid of the dark in the apartment where I lived alone for the next four years and wouldn’t touch the show from that point on. *Until* an internet acquaintance started watching it from the beginning for the first time and suggested that she thought I would like it. I gave it another go, found myself intrigued and *much* less scared by it, and here we are. Nine months later, I am halfway through season ten (which means I have the entirety of a decently long-running TV show’s worth left to watch. Fifteen seasons. Fifteen. Whut.), there’s SPN paraphernalia all over my office, and that internet acquaintance is a dear friend with whom I discuss every episode. I would love this show without the buddy watch component (the mythology! the exploration of good and evil! the Impala! the music! the family dynamics! the meta episodes! Misha Collins’s blue, blue eyes! DEAN WINCHESTER.), but finding a new friend and clicking with her in that way that is just so rare after your twenties was the highlight of 2019 for me. If you are among the handful of people who have had to listen to me talk about this show ad nauseum this past year, I do apologize. Sort of.

Phoebe and Her Unicorn

I first heard about the Phoebe and Her Unicorn comic when it was mentioned in passing on a podcast I listen to. And then this past summer Barnes and Noble had a huge display of the collections set up in the store, so I decided to give the first one a go. And I loved it to sparkly little bits. The premise is that Phoebe meets a unicorn and saves her from staring ceaselessly at her own reflection. As a reward, the unicorn offers Phoebe a wish, and Phoebe wishes for the unicorn to be her friend. And then the two have all kinds of adventures together. If you’re thinking along the lines of Calvin and Hobbes, you are on the right track, though Phoebe and Marigold Heavenly Nostrils are all their own thing and an absolute hilarious delight.

The Crown 

This past year saw the release of the third season of The Crown, the Netflix show following Queen Elizabeth II’s time on the throne, and I’ve been watching it right along. So the show certainly wasn’t new to me this year, but this season was so good that it almost felt like a new discovery. I was wary about the cast change (though of course it was, or at least soon would have been, necessary given the ageing of the characters portrayed), but the new cast is just as stunningly brilliant as the first was. I’m already looking forward to season four with great anticipation.

A Fatal Grace

I read the first in the Inspector Gamache series by Louise Penny in 2018 and liked it all right. I read the whole thing (always a sign that I enjoyed a book at least on some level), but I wasn’t really grabbed by the world or the characters. I was reading the book on the suggestion of a good friend (a different good friend than either of those mentioned above—ain’t I lucky?) who was deep into the series and would like to discuss them with me, so I committed to trying at least the second book. And the second book hooked me! I settled into Three Pines, started really falling in love with Gamache, and found myself wanting to return to the world Penny had created when I had finished book two. I suspect this will mark the beginning of a long relationship with this series for me, along with many book discussions with my friend, which are always a treat.

The Mandalorian

Baby Yoda. Do I have to say more? But seriously, Husbeast and I just loved loved loved the first season of this show. The half-hour installments are just the right amount of Star Wars in a go, and the stories are intriguing. And then there’s Mando, who I instantly fell in love with, and who is played by Pedro Pascal impeccably and with nuance from behind a helmet. Can’t wait for more of this.

Black Sails (CW for violence and rape)

Black Sails takes a few of the characters from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and tosses them together with some historical pirates and puts them in a specific historical time frame and then sits back to watch as the yards get armed. It is a gloriousness of tall ships and the sea and plotting and a fripping incredible soundtrack. (Go watch/listen to the opening credits. Why still here? Go!) Best of all, perhaps, (I am about to *seriously* spoil the experience of the whole show, so DO NOT proceed if you are planning on watching) is a reveal in season two. If you are like me, you have experienced many a TV show over the years where you are *sure*, based on their behavior, the way scenes are played, how they look at other characters, and how other characters talk about them, that a character is gay or bi, only to sit through season upon season with that element of the show either never coming to fruition or suddenly erased. Sometimes referred to as queerbaiting, this is a tactic that another show in this post is super* guilty of. But on Black Sails, after a season and a bit worth of characterization that feels like it might well be that familiar queerbaiting build up, it turns out that Captain Flint *was* in fact in love with another man and that the tragic ending of that affair *is* in fact what is motivating so many of his actions. The reveal is a glorious, glorious moment that made me punch the air, shout “Yes!” loud enough to scare the fuzzbeasts, and rewind to rewatch the scene agape. I’m still working my way through the rest of the show, and I have every expectation that I will continue to love it, but no matter what, it will forever hold a special place in my heart for that moment.

*Heh.