Watching a lot of tee vee over this vacation, and I can feel sanity and strength restoring me show by show by show... Given the fact that one of the shows I'm enjoying most at the moment is "The Masked Singer" (which has spectacle to watch as your evil empire dies around you written all over it) demonstrates amply that sanity can be forged from the contemplation of the fever dreams of insanity. As a Doctor Who fan this comes as no great surprise.
Now that the season of holiday baking competitions is over, we are watching the tattered remains of the format left to us, for now, "Kids Baking Championship" and a Giada de Laurentiis gargoyle called "Winner Cake All." Speaking of gargoyles, we are giving Mama Ru her due this All-Stars as well. We are not young enough to declare the show has jumped the shark, tho' we do give it the occasional stink eye in between continued gaggings as our favorite queens never seem to win anymore. I'm also enjoying the last season of the turgid melodrama "Versailles," which I found OnDemand and binged in a few gory days.
Finished the most recent season of "Call the Midwife" a couple of days ago, a show which despite (oh, go ahead, admit it, because of) its cloying and clumsy sentimentality was probably my favorite show for a couple of its seasons -- an account of the emergence of the NHS and welfare state in 50s Britain, an earnest repudiation of the easy cynicism of Obama technocrats, Bernie fauxvolutionaries, and the trolls across the white supremacist/cisheteronormative GOP-to-libertechian right. The last two seasons haven't worked as well for me, as the many talented and wonderful actresses of the sprawling ensemble all seem too busy to actually assemble and the show scatters into isolated stories instead punctuated by sudden deaths and other weird vanishing acts that make the whole show more disrupted than bolstering. I was quite stunned however when the show ended with the cast gathered before the tube as we hear the announcement on the BBC of Kennedy's assassination and the sisters switched off the television right as the delayed opening broadcast of the premier episode of Doctor Who (I do believe?) was about to suffuse Nonnatus House with the hum of the TARDIS in the stunningly weird and wonderful opening of "An Unearthly Child," a collision of televisual narrative designed as it were especially for me, at exactly the time I would most benefit from the collision...
Anyway, I've got just one week before spring courses resume. Next week I've got syllabi to prune and print, links to burnish, thesis drafts to read, lectures to pull out of mothballs and rework, and much more. The lovely long relaxation in front of the tube with a cat on my lap under a faux-fur comforter popping strawberries and nonpareils in my mouth is, alas, nearly over...
Now that the season of holiday baking competitions is over, we are watching the tattered remains of the format left to us, for now, "Kids Baking Championship" and a Giada de Laurentiis gargoyle called "Winner Cake All." Speaking of gargoyles, we are giving Mama Ru her due this All-Stars as well. We are not young enough to declare the show has jumped the shark, tho' we do give it the occasional stink eye in between continued gaggings as our favorite queens never seem to win anymore. I'm also enjoying the last season of the turgid melodrama "Versailles," which I found OnDemand and binged in a few gory days.
Finished the most recent season of "Call the Midwife" a couple of days ago, a show which despite (oh, go ahead, admit it, because of) its cloying and clumsy sentimentality was probably my favorite show for a couple of its seasons -- an account of the emergence of the NHS and welfare state in 50s Britain, an earnest repudiation of the easy cynicism of Obama technocrats, Bernie fauxvolutionaries, and the trolls across the white supremacist/cisheteronormative GOP-to-libertechian right. The last two seasons haven't worked as well for me, as the many talented and wonderful actresses of the sprawling ensemble all seem too busy to actually assemble and the show scatters into isolated stories instead punctuated by sudden deaths and other weird vanishing acts that make the whole show more disrupted than bolstering. I was quite stunned however when the show ended with the cast gathered before the tube as we hear the announcement on the BBC of Kennedy's assassination and the sisters switched off the television right as the delayed opening broadcast of the premier episode of Doctor Who (I do believe?) was about to suffuse Nonnatus House with the hum of the TARDIS in the stunningly weird and wonderful opening of "An Unearthly Child," a collision of televisual narrative designed as it were especially for me, at exactly the time I would most benefit from the collision...
Anyway, I've got just one week before spring courses resume. Next week I've got syllabi to prune and print, links to burnish, thesis drafts to read, lectures to pull out of mothballs and rework, and much more. The lovely long relaxation in front of the tube with a cat on my lap under a faux-fur comforter popping strawberries and nonpareils in my mouth is, alas, nearly over...
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