To follow up from my previous post, “Netflix, like crack,” we did watch Breaking Bad. Hence the new title. ’Cause, you know, meth is a big part of that show. And now we’re on to Mad Men, and if I’d written a piece after we finished with that show, it’d likely be titled “Netflix, like nicotine,” ’cause of all the smoking. May as well beat this addiction metaphor into the ground, right?
No we didn’t finish Breaking Bad. Netflix hasn’t posted the last eight episodes in the United States. (Apparently it has elsewhere, ’cause Netflix was the only pusher supplier of the show in other countries.) Yes, I already know who dies and who doesn’t, ’cause the internet can’t keep it’s bloody mouth shut, but I’ll watch the rest of it anyway once Netflix finally puts them online.
We had the same problem with Fringe, y'know: The fifth and final season didn’t go online till mid-September. (Yeah, I can see why everyone said it wasn’t as good as the previous seasons. Still liked it though.) So once it was available, we dropped Breaking Bad temporarily and whipped through it. Now it’s really done.
Meanwhile, since I hadn’t kept up with Mad Men for a few years, I’m getting caught up. I started at the beginning. Mom has been watching right along. Considering all the drinking and smoking and adultery which takes place on the show, she’s taken to calling it Bad Men, but she’s still watching. Not sure how many flashbacks it’s giving her of the ‘60s; she was still a kid then. I was born in '71, so obviously I have no memories of the '60s at all, but plenty of the '60s-era stuff was still around, and I totally remember it. Like the fashions, the decor, the cars and their lack of seatbelts, the alcoholism, the smoking (which my parents despised), the casual racism and sexism (of which my parents didn’t approve… well, the racism mainly; Christians still have a ways to go on the sexism), the movies, and a lot of the music. As for the historical events, I’m more up on them than Mom is, 'cause history is my thing. Apparently it’s the writers’ thing too.
Mom tried to get me into an old show she used to watch as a kid, One Step Beyond. Ugh. She compared it with The Twilight Zone, which of course we both like, but One Step Beyond doesn’t come remotely close to Rod Serling’s ability to write good TV. (Most shows don’t.) Supposedly the premise of the show is the supernatural: They show a half-hour-long sketch where someone sees a ghost, or has a psychic premonition, or improbably coincidences which might “mean” something. If you believe in the supernatural, but not Christianity, the worldview of One Step Beyond might be your cup of tea.
But it’s plagued with the usual problem with '50s and '60s television: Overacting. Y'see, early TV tended to hire stage actors, and stage actors of course act for the stage, which is to say they telegraph everything for people who were watching it from 10 to 100 feet away. It’s a much different style of acting than TV or movies today, where the camera and microphone can get right up in your face, and you can act like a real human being instead of an exaggeration of a real human being. Good actors can switch back and forth. Poor actors, or actors who don’t understand the medium, not so much. Anyway, I can forgive overacting when the story’s a good one, just like I forgave William Shatner for Star Trek. It’s a lot harder when it’s drek like One Step Beyond.
Yesterday, I killed our modem. So until Comcast could send a guy out to repair it (which he did this morning), we had to go a day without internet. Which means a day without Netflix. Which is interesting: It shows how utterly dependent you can become on the thing. We did fine, I think. Mom watched Iron Man 3 (I’ve seen it already), and I watched an episode of The Norm Show and read a few chapters of Missionary Methods. If I had to be deprived of Netflix, of course I’d go back to checking out TV series from the library, or just watching them off Toudou and Hulu or
But it’d be a pain in the tail whenever my nieces and nephews come over, and wanna watch the idiot box. Our selection of kid movies is pathetic. I can keep 'em entertained by digging up something on YouTube, but when it comes to the stuff they request to watch, Netflix has me beat. (Although I don’t always take their requests. I’ll make 'em watch kid-friendly science documentaries. Make 'em learn. It doesn’t have to be an idiot box, you know.)