Blockbuster got me in the habit of watching the entire run of a TV show. Back in the ’00s I started subscribing to their video-by-mail service, which they ripped off from Netflix, but the reason they got my business was ’cause if I returned the mail-in video to my local Blockbuster store, I could swap it for a free rental. So, y'know, twice the movies.
But I quickly ran out of movies. So I started watching old TV shows. And binge-watching whole seasons of TV shows is fun. True, you immediately see all the flaws in the storytelling, which you’re much less likely to catch when it’s spread out over a course of 25 weeks, but still: Why spend ten months waiting to see how things on any given show are gonna turn out, when you can find out over the weekend? Why wait two months to see if this show’s ever gonna be any good, when you can find out after a few hours?
I don’t have Blockbuster anymore; the only remnant left of them in town is a Redbox-style kiosk in the local Safeway. Got Neflix though. But for the past several years my way of doing the TV show binge was the local library. Borrow a season, watch it over the next four weeks (or quicker, usually), turn it in, borrow the next. Blockbuster had a much bigger selection, but with the library I don’t have to wait three days for the next disc in the set. Though if it’s a popular series I may have to wait a month for the next set.
More recently I’ve been binging on old series I haven’t seen in a while. I don’t bother to watch broadcast TV, so I never see the reruns. Went through all the episodes of M*A*S*H, 30 Rock, The West Wing, Firefly, Friends, Seinfeld, and I’m just starting Battlestar Galactica again (which is kinda interesting now that I know how it ends: There were tons of hints in it as to how it ends). I think I freaked out my brother when I casually told him I was watching 20-year-old episodes of Friends. He hadn’t thought of himself as that old.
But one of the misfires was when I started re-watching Murphy Brown. Which was one of my favorite shows, in the ’80s and ’90s: It used to be on Monday nights, and I’d take a half-hour break in the middle of newspaper production to watch the show. (Hey, my section was done.)
I was warned it hadn’t aged well. It was one of those sitcoms that liked to include a lot of topical references: You wouldn’t get the Dan Quayle jokes if you didn’t know who Dan Quayle was. Or Tip O'Neal, or Bob Dole, or William Rehnquist, or exactly what Tipper Gore was testifying about in the Congress. You need to be up on your ’80s and ’90s political history, and for that matter a fair amount of the ’70s.
But that actually wasn’t the problem. The problem is the show isn’t funny.
I used to laugh my head off at this show. Now: A chuckle here, a chuckle there. Most of the jokes are clichΓ©s. Hackery. Humor based on two-dimensional character stereotypes. Worse: Ignorant character stereotypes. They treat Murphy’s alcoholism (which she’s just got back from rehab over) as a past character defect, not something she still deals with. She and her colleagues keep going to Phil’s, a nearby bar; she never appears to be tempted to drink more than club soda. Okay, once she’s tempted by a glass of champagne, but not for long. She’s more tempted by the food in a polystyrene container after she gave up polystyrene.
She never goes to AA, never confronts the issues which made her drink, never looks back on those issues—missing a huge opportunity to analyze her relationship with her best friend, Frank, who’s so co-dependent it’s nuts. There’s a wealth of comic material there, but it’s all squandered by shallow, fairly obvious satires of the news business.
Warner Brothers released the first season on DVD, but never bothered with the second. Sales were in the toilet, and every episode begins with a different classic Motown song—so it likely costs them a fortune to purchase the rights to all that music. I watched a few episodes of season 2 off the internet, but the show didn’t get any better, so I gave up.
It’s not that it didn’t age well: It’s that I grew up, and expect much better of my TV programs.