Media confessions

[grammarwoman]

My husband has given up being surprised when I know all about a movie or TV show despite having never seen it, because being fandom adjacent is a sort of omniscience.

However, I feel compelled to confess the gaps in my fannish experience, ie the things I haven't finished or never got around to seeing that it seems EVERYONE else has:

Leverage
Due South
Fringe (though this one is less my fault, as I was specifically asked to not watch it so my TV killing curse would spare it, and then never got back to it)
Orphan Black, season 3ish and onward
The Librarians, season 2 and onward
Avatar: TLA, season 1sh and onward
Legend of Korra
The Clone Wars
Star Wars Rebels
Slings and Arrows
Person of Interest
Supernatural
Parks & Rec
Community


At some point, I would love to get around to working my way through this list. It'll probably mean watching less HGTV, for starters.

So which do you think I should start with? And what fannishly popular media have you missed yourselves?

Comments

[kass]

Leverage is thoroughly delightful. So is Slings & Arrows, especially the first season! Actually S1 of S&A is one of my favorite pieces of media anywhere, and it's only 6 eps long, so I think you should start there because it is short and charing and awesome.

[ghost_lingering]

My opinions of what I've seen:

Leverage -- delightful but forgettable (delightful ot3)
Due South -- the canon didn't live up to what I wanted from it based on my experience with the fandom
Fringe -- I love the first two and a half seasons, HATE the end of season 3 and rage quit. I am not numb enough to watch the rest
Orphan Black, season 3ish and onward - SHOW OF MY HEART
Avatar: TLA, season 1sh and onward - SHOW OF MY HEART
Slings and Arrows - SHOW OF MY HEART. GEOFFREY WAS MY FIRST HAMLET (as in the first time I saw Hamlet, Paul Gross was Hamlet). Dislike Richard's plots and a few other things but the central trio, Anna, and all the theater ARE SO GOOD.
Supernatural - HISSSSSSSSSSS DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE GO AWAY AND NEVER COME BACK
Parks & Rec - will never live up to the hype for me. I've tried watching it twice and bounced back HARD both times and then was made to feel bad by people who love it because my reasons for bouncing back apparently aren't as valid as their reasons for loving it. VERY BITTER HISSSS.
Community - First two seasons were SHOW OF MY HEART, but I dropped off mid-season 3 and haven't yet picked it back up (got fed up with Pierce and then Harmon was ousted and I had a mix of feelings about some of the season 3 episodes/plots, would like to finish it)

[princessofgeeks]

Slings and Arrows. It is so incredibly wonderful. In a class by itself.

[anoel]

I would most recommend Parks and Recreation (hilarious, warmhearted, Leslie Knope is pure love BUT s1 is bad, if you need to skip it's okay to skip to S2), Due South (for the amazing characters/ship(s) but especially because of the vids) and Slings and Arrows is a slice of pure goodness, all three seasons. If you do Supernatural, I would recommend S1+2 and then S3 is not good and you can watch S4+5 if you like the show. But S1-2 is most important for vids.

I need to finish Fringe as well and I need to get back to my X-Files watch (I'm on early s2) as well as FINALLY finishing Hannnibal.

[gwyn]

I'd pick Community and Due South, but I hate the last season/two seasons (it was shown as one season, but all the fans of it seem to insist it's two) so I can never recommend it (I felt Paul Gross had no idea what made that show so great when he took the reins of it after it was rebooted, and reboots of shows really rarely do what made them great in the first place). So you might want to take my advice with a grain of salt. Still, man, I loved those first two years of Due South. I love Leverage, too, and Slings and Arrows is really unlike anything else you'll watch on TV. Fringe was fantastic but they changed the focus from the female character to the male, and it kinda went off the rails--still, Olivia will always be a favorite character.

[shati]

Hah, the only ones I've seen all of are A:tLA and Korra. You may not care about color palette variety in your TV to the extent that I do, but they both make good palate cleansers after something grim (esp A:tLA) and/or desaturated.

I watched parts of season 2 of Korra on fastforward and I know a lot of people didn't like A:tLA season 1 at all, but they're not really much like any of the other shows on the list (that I've seen episodes of), in good ways. Mostly good ways, I guess I never watched season 2 of any of the others on fastforward.

Someday I want to vid HGTV.

[heresluck]

Personally, I would vote for Slings & Arrows; it's delightful, there are only three seasons, and the seasons are only 6 eps. Also it is one of my favorite shows ever ever ever -- though parts of it, especially the parts that are supposed to be ~funny!~, are not entirely to my taste and I do a fair amount of fast-forwarding when I rewatch.

Leverage was a mixed bag for me. I can whole-heartedly recommend the first season; the second season was also fun, and then I got bored -- though I did go back for parts of the final season, and that was happy-making. Part of the issue, for me, was that the show could not make up its mind whether it wanted to be episodic or arc-driven. Normally I go for arc-driven, but this was a show where I just wanted Shenanigans of the Week, especially because the writers' choices about arc material did not highlight what I found interesting about the characters.

Orphan Black is worth watching just for the tour de force that is Tatiana Maslany. Again, it's been a bit of a mixed bag; S1 is good, S2 is better, S3 is... less good, and S4 was better than S3 but kind of bewildering.

I liked Fringe all the way to the end -- the latter seasons have some hiccups but are still worth watching, imo. S2 and S3 are some of the most thrilling SF I've ever seen, honestly.

Avatar: TLA is charming. I found it fairly forgettable, ultimately, but YMMV, and it was certainly enjoyable.

Due South... ahahahaha. So many people love this show. I vidded this show because of some of them. And I do genuinely like the characters. But I cannot really recommend the show itself, not least because it hit my embarassment squick with a HAMMER. If this is not an issue for you, and if you are willing to be quizzed about which Ray you like best, then godspeed, my friend. Alternatively, you could just watch the pilot episode and the first episode of S3 and then read all the fic.

...and the rest I haven't seen (or I saw a few eps and they didn't ping for me).

[umadoshi]

I have no thoughts on which you should start with, but that list includes many of my favorite shows. *^^* (And I second anoel's take on S1 of Parks and Rec. The show is otherwise amazing and joyful, but IMO season 1's sole redeeming quality is that it's very short. >.<

There's so much media I've missed entirely that fandom adores--due South, all the Stargate versions, and the West Wing are the first ones that come to mind. Oh, and Farscape. And I've seen hardly any Doctor Who.

There's a reason my tv-to-watch tab is up to almost 200 shows. ^^;

I have due South feels!

[lizbetann]

Aaaaahhh, I am resisting just saying "Why why why do people recommend skipping season 1 and 2 when THOSE ARE THE ACTUAL GOOD SEASONS" and reminding myself that people swing both Rays.

Actually, it's more of a case of which Paul you swing -- Haggis or Gross? The original creator, Paul Haggis, created a loopy magical realism show -- of which one of the most unrealistic realism bits was that there was this perfect, beautiful, honorable, noble man... who lived in Chicago with a deaf wolf.

75% of the time, that's what due South was -- juuuust this side of self-consciously wacky. A lot of fun, but not a lot of deep.

But. One of my favorite moments in the show comes in first season when the Perfect Canadian (TM) is confronting a childhood enemy of Ray #1 (said enemy grew up to be the local petty mob heavy, said Ray grew up to be a cop).

Said petty mob guy has been trying to buy Frasier's approval in a heavy-handed sort of way. And Frasier cuts him down: "What I want, Mr. Zuko, and what the law allows, are two entirely different things."

And you realize that Frasier (Benton Fraiser, or Benny) is not as aw-shucks ignorant as he comes off. He's not a good, decent, honorable person because it has never occurred to him to be anything else. It's a chilling moment because it is so quiet -- without a lot of drama, we see that this person we respect so much could do horrible (or not-so-horrible but maybe be just as petty) things -- if it wasn't for his sense of honor.

When the show hits those moments, it is stunning.

As for Season 3 (or Seasons 3/4 -- I think the difference is that in the US it aired as one "season" and in Canada it aired split as two short seasons, but I could be wrong) -- in my humble opinion, it upped the wacky without really digging into that core of stillness in the center. I gave up on the show not because it pissed me off, but because it BORED me (mind you, I bailed during a Rashomon ep, which are always tricky). But, among other changes, they took a strong female character who was rather self-consciously prickly and "difficult" but who was attracted to Benny regardless and... massively over-saturated her in Photoshop. She became MORE prickly, MORE attracted (losing-places-in-sentences-attracted, which was in contrast to her hard-assness from before) and it just squicked me.

Now, there is a huge dividing line in the fandom -- whether the first season closer two-parter Victoria's Secret is massively awesome or an abomination unto this earth. I actually was hooked on the show due to that two parter (a woman from Benny's past comes back and basically attempts to trash everything he stands for) so I think it's massively awesome.

Paul Gross is on record as saying he didn't think it worked with the show and didn't really feel it was in keeping with it. And I think the divide between my opinion of Victoria's Secret and Paul Gross's points to why I didn't much like his version of the show.

Um. *blush* Did I mention the due South feels?

Also with Community feels too

[lizbetann]

I liked all seasons of Community (the last three are all half-seasons, so basically you have 4 and a half seasons total).

While the roots of what the show would be were there in first season, it kind of wasn't until second that it starting really getting its feet under it. Its another one with the massive wackyness (although it never slips out of realism to become magical realism -- unless you count the 6 alternate universes...)

Season 4 (the creater-less half-season) tries too hard to prove it is still The Same Show, but it doesn't suck. But I think seasons 2 and 3 are my favorite -- there is the zombie apocalypse Halloween, the Christmas where they all turned into claymation figures, the day they played D&D to save someone's life, the Blanket versus Pillow Fort civil war, the Law & Order: Community episode, the time they played a crappy 8-bit video game to save their friend's fortune... that's not mentioning the show that DETAILED all the 6 alternate universes, the time they became the school's glee club, the time that the (former) Spanish teacher took over the school and attempted to blow it up (by playing keytair) and any of the paintball episodes. Or Inspector Spacetime. Or the Air Conditioning Annex. Or... *forcibly stops herself*

The thing is, in all that full-out wackiness, there was (usually) a central core of character. People acted the way they acted because of their personalities and because of the stresses they were enduring. Most of the above wackiness followed from friendships with people who were broken but (cue Stitch) still good, still family.

So yeah... I whole-heartedly recommend Community.