It’s not such a great surprise that a fiction addict would make a TV series junkie too. I love me a good story and when I find one, I stick to it, sometimes even when it goes stale on account of not accepting that it needs to end before losing all dignity and a fair amount of viewers. Most TV series find a success recipe and then end up reheating that old soup till you have enough, but others know how to go out in style and that’s mostly the case with HBO series.
There are good news out there and it looks like my addiction will soon be fed with high quality material again, as Jonathan Franzen is writing a series based on his novel The Corrections in which secondary characters will play important roles and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is also being turned into a TV series. I am a bit nervous about the latter since I don’t really see Egan’s writing turned into a good script, but Franzen would have made a great Dickens style feuilleton writer so I have a feeling he’ll be fine in this medium.
My top 5 TV series:
1. Rome – I loved those old Roman bastards and their deadly intrigues, too bad it got cancelled before its time. The story and the characters developed organically and they were not one bit strained, plus I loved the idea of looking at real iconic moments and historical figures from the perspective of low class fictional characters.
2. Mad Men – It took a while to get the hang of it because it often looked more like a history/sociology class on the 60, but by the time I got hooked, it had already begun to get stale. I’m not so crazy about Don Draper, he’s more an excuse to get all sorts of sociological case studies of female psychology to bed and into the script, than a real human being.
3. Breaking Bad – Loved the first 2 seasons, but gave up on it later on.
4. Dexter – same problem. Loved the idea, but how many serial killers are there out there?!
5. 30 Rock – Haven’t laughed this hard since Seinfeld, but somehow the characters gradually became caricatures of themselves. Good thing it ended before completely losing it.
