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June 21, 2009
Bore vs. Gore
A few days ago Rebecca left a comment on my post about True Blood that brought me up short: she mentioned that she found the show kinda boring.
Yeah, I thought, she has a point. It is kinda boring. I could tell I was kinda bored because I would get up and walk into the kitchen without pausing the dvd player so I wouldn't miss anything. Occasionally, I would fast forward through something extra tedious.
It just didn't seem like a big deal. In grad school you get really used to reading and watching boring stuff all the way to the end. It got to where if something was merely boring, instead of, say, boring and misogynist, or boring and irrelevant, or boring and riddles with errors of grammar and logic, I was grateful.
Bore me, in other words, just a little bit, and I'll go along for the ride. Bore me AND offend me, and I'm gone.
Which is what happened with True Blood. It moved from being just kinda boring to being kinda boring AND horrifically violent and gory and mean-spirited. All but a few moments of Episode Ten depicted the characters being completely HORRIBLE to each other. I fast-forwarded through more than I ever had before, and at the end, I felt I'd been assaulted. I was heartsick and nauseated, and I needed a bath as much as the characters who ended up drenched in blood--and I mean drenched in blood, having taking a blood shower, with it saturating hair, face, nostrils and clothes.
I took the disk out of the dvd player, put it in its Netflix envelope, and sent it off. Then I went to my Netflix queue and deleted the one remaining disk for the season. There are only two episodes left, but I don't want to know what happens in them.
The same thing happened with another tv series I dabbled in recently, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Netflix recommended it, based on my interest in To the Manor Born and Yes, Minister (which I never got around to blogging about), and I thought, what the hell--particularly since the library had it and I could keep the entire show for two weeks, since I had a feeling I wouldn't race through it. I made it through the first season and was interested enough (in a horrified sort of way) in the sexism, racism and general hardcore weirdness of 1970s British television to look past the boringness of the show. Season II was much the same--until, two eps before the season ended, the main character decided that he was going to ruin his life, AND everyone else's in the process, because he was bored.
And I couldn't put up with that. I'd been willing to go along with the sorta boring depiction of his sorta boring life; I didn't feel obligated to destroy the dvd or my tv or anything, just because this guy bored me. So when he decided to engage in wanton destruction, just 'cause he was bored, I took the dvd out of the player, replaced it in the case, and took the whole thing back to the library. I didn't even glance at the third season or the extras. I was done.
I guess that's one reason I could make it through the whole season of Dollhouse: It only annoyed me; it didn't annoy me AND bore me.
It's kinda sad, really. I should have higher standards. I might work on that.
In the meantime, I have the entire first season of Gossip Girl from the library. We'll see how I do with that.
Posted by holly at June 21, 2009 7:55 AM
True Blood bored me too and I gave up a mere few episodes in on Season One. I'm all about Nurse Jackie now (okay, I've only seen the first episode).
There was a time I'd let myself be carried along through periods of boredom with my entertainment as long as I ended up with a somewhat satisfied feeling by the end. Now I feel like my time's being wasted and I know how to do that all on my own so I'm quick to turn.
I watched - and enjoyed pretty well - the first season of Gossip Girl. It was my cotton candy guilty pleasure show. After I think 2 episodes of the second season I decided the show had gone from cotton candy to deep fried twinkie, and my guilty pleasure excesses do not go that far. I quit that one, too.
I'll have to wait until Nurse Jackie is out on dvd, Dale, but I am a longtime fan of Edie Falco--I loved her in Hal Hartley's movies. Rebecca, I finished season 1 of GG--flawed, but enjoyable, though I felt kinda sick afterward. I trust your assessment of season 2, but I'll probably check it out myself anyway, just to make sure.