Yay! It's Friday! Not that I've had a stressful working week, and not that weekends are that much different for me, but Friday-night television gives me something to look forward to. Or, it used to. Now it's kind of disappointing, since the Sci Fi Channel pretty much imploded its Friday-night lineup so now all that's worth watching is Stargate Atlantis. Moonlight kind of fits, but it's on a different network. Sadly, Fox even seems to have given up on putting the shows I love that they're planning to kill three episodes later on Friday night (an interesting side effect of the writers' strike that was mentioned on the noon news today: those shows that didn't debut to stellar ratings but that could build an audience if the network gave them a chance may actually get a chance this season because the networks aren't going to pull anything that has episodes produced or scripts written, so there may not be so many "three episodes, and you're out" situations).
My love of the Friday-night geek-out goes back to the early days of The X-Files. I built an entire ritual out of spending Friday night in front of the television. First, I'd make a fun dinner to eat while watching that season's Death Slot show (at least back then, they gave the series a significant portion of a season before killing it), then as time for X-Files grew closer, I'd make a hot beverage, sometimes make a snack or dessert (I loved those slice-and-bake cookies because I could make just two or three at a time in minutes), turn out all the lights, light some candles, then curl up on the sofa.
Yikes, that sounds like I was dating a TV show, doesn't it? That might explain my social life.
Of course, after the episode ended, I'd have to run around the house turning ALL the lights on so I could be sure no bendy serial killers had wormed their way into my apartment through the water pipes.
I don't even remember what was on Friday nights after they moved The X-Files to Sunday nights -- probably a lot of doomed shows (I do recall Now and Again, the one with John Goodman's brain in Eric Close's body) -- but nothing caught me strongly enough to really get into my psyche. Then my Friday date-night-with-my-television experience returned when Firefly came on. I was back to making the perfect dinner or dessert to enjoy while watching. Not too long after they killed Firefly, my cable system finally got the Sci Fi Channel, and it was geek heaven because they programmed their good stuff on Fridays, and I could make a whole evening out of it. There were the Stargates, and Battlestar Galactica and then Doctor Who. I'm sorry, but Flash Gordon and Painkiller Jane just don't cut it. As much as I enjoy Friday Night Lights, it just feels wrong for my Friday nights. I may start taping it to watch on Sundays.
Speaking of The X-Files, this may be one of those things that borders on blasphemy in some circles, but I don't think that making another movie is such a great idea. It's over. Let it be. That show collapsed under the weight of its own plotting, and there's no way out of that. They say the movie will be a standalone monster-of-the-week, but how can they even do that, given that the series ended with our heroes on the run after Mulder had been tried and found guilty of something (I'd zoned out by the time we found out), and they'd more or less gone underground. There was no longer an X-Files unit. So unless Mulder is still obsessively freelancing after all this time, or unless the Magic Plot Fairy waves her wand and makes everything okay so Mulder and Scully can be back at the FBI, how can they even do a standalone story? The plot arc was so entangling and all-encompassing by the end that it can't be entirely disregarded even in an unrelated monster story.
I was a huge fan of the show. In fact, that was what drove me to go online in the first place, when I heard about alt.tv.x-files, where I could find other people to chat with about it. Before I got a modem for my home computer, I used to go to the office on Saturdays, with some flimsy excuse about work in case I wasn't the only one there, so I could go online and read and discuss. My old pen name was an X-Files reference. I even found myself exploring the idea of moving to Washington, D.C. But I greeted the news of the movie with more of an "oh dear" than a "yay!" Am I alone in this? Supernatural is currently meeting whatever inner need for me that The X-Files used to fill, and Duchovny has grown to be just plain creepy looking with age, rather than cutely creepy, so Supernatural even has better eye candy.
In other news, I have galley proofs for Don't Hex With Texas to review, and I really must clean my kitchen. It turns out that I was wrong about the cleaning the kitchen makes me want to cook theory. I suspect I was driven to clean the kitchen because I wanted to cook, since not cleaning the kitchen didn't make me stop cooking. And as a result, if I don't do something soon, the EPA may step in. And then I need to decide what to do this weekend. I feel like I want to do something, and there are a few options with low cost barriers, but I'm not sure which things I want to do or how much I really want to do them.
No comments:
Post a Comment