Last week the cable guy came --we have Time-Warner -- and gave us a new box. The box we had for several years could no longer get a picture from HBO or Showtime and the cable guy said it was just the start of the box's failure. The new box will now record twice as much on the DVR as the old box, which somewhat makes up for the fact I can no longer record on VHS tapes (of which I threw out many, mostly unwatched, when we moved two years ago). Previously when I ran out of room on the DVR I would record those movies (mostly) on VHS tapes and then delete them. When I could no longer do that (for reasons that were never truly explained to my satisfaction) I had the dilemma of deleting or watching when I may not have been in the mood for that particular film. Why have cable at all I am sometimes asked. Mainly for Turner Classic Movies, I reply. For one who loves classical films it would be a difficult channel to do without, for Turner shows movies uncut, uninterrupted and in the proper aspect ratio, It also shows many classical films that are otherwise unavailable. Someone recently asked me if it wasn't the case that all of the movies on Turner were available on DVD. Would that it were so! I did a count on a random month and determined that 80% of what Turner shows is not available on tape or DVD! Sure, most of Hitchcock is available on DVD, but for those of us who love Borzage, Ulmer, Joseph H. Lewis, Frank Tashlin and many other relatively unheralded geniuses of classical film it is an entirely different matter.
My 17-year-old son Gideon and my wife Susan have little interest in TV, though Susan does like the movies of John Ford and Raoul Walsh and watches them with me, as well as using her limited time to watch more obscure movies by Val Lewton and others who make impressive films in sixty to seventy-five minutes. And we do allow our four-year-old to watch an hour of TV a day; she has moved from Scooby-Doo to Sofia the First to, currently, Looney Toons, recorded from Boomerang. Many of these are mediocre. of course (we always watch with her) but some by Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng are quite brilliant indeed.
I do watch some shows that are not movies. Currently these include:
On broad cast TV: The Good Wife and Blindspot. The Good Wife, produced by Michelle King and Robert King, stars a low-key Julianne Margulies as a lawyer with a politician husband, with a complex Perry-Mason-style approach. Blindspot, created by Martin Gero, is the kind of secret conspiracy programmer for which I have a weakness, i.e, I wouldn't recommend to others the way I would The Good Wife.
Showtime: The Affair and Homeland. The Affair, produced by Sarah Treem and Hagai Levi (who did the fascinating In Treatment for HBO) is an effectively class-conscious melodrama about love and money, though it does include some irritating time-jumping, as too many shows these days do. Homeland is produced by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, who did 24; one season of Homeland is equivalent in plot to one episode of 24. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and Mandy Patinkin and Clair Danes are both effective, each neurotic in their own way. Still, there is too much mysterious plotting, even for a spy drama.
HBO: The Leftovers. I had read Tom Perrota's original book but the first season lost me along the way, though the episodes that focused on individual grief were powerful. This season Damon Lidelof, who sent us over a cliff with the originally promising Lost, is leading the league in obscurity, which he seems to confuse with profundity, though he is no Antonioni. The theme song, by Iris Dement, is quite wonderful.
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