Subject To Change

I’ve recently been watching, and rewatching, some TV shows. Some good, some bad. When I say good, I mean the best TV show I’ve ever seen actually - The Wire.

Now, I enjoy some cop shows. Not many, but some. People kept telling me how good The Wire was and I’d keep telling them I’d watch it some time. And finally I caved in and got it. Well, I got season 1. Thought I’d give it a watch, tell the people who’d told me I had to watch it that I’d seen it, it wasn’t bad and get on with things. So, I stuck season 1 on and watched it. Then i got season 2. Then 3…4…5…

There’s no one thing that makes The Wire as good as it is. Sure, the acting is excellent, but there’s a lot of shows with good acting. The script is excellent, but there’s a load of some (remembered some of the other shows I’ve watched recently, sorry) good writers out there.

What makes The Wire the best show I’ve ever seen is the fact that everything about it is: a) excellent, and; b) totally believable. It almost felt like watching a dirty, nasty, gritty documentary apart from the fact that the stories were so well told that they’d never happen that perfectly in real life. And it’s not just a cop show. It’s a show about a city. About politics, crime and society. I could happily eulogize for hours about this show, but I’ll leave you with two words: WATCH IT.

On the flipside of my recent TV watching is something else people have been bugging me to watch for ages - Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Once again, finally I gave in and borrowed the DVDs from a friend.

Now, after watching The Wire, I was expecting a bit of a comedown, a bit of a jolt back to the reality of TV normalcy. But not quite this big a jolt.

Buffy and I don’t get along. In fact that might be sugar coating it. I hate it. I hate the writing, the characters, the acting, the music (apart from one song in one episode). Nothing about it engaged me. The dialogue was awful, badly written and stilted, though the acting “talent” saying the lines certainly didn’t help. I’m going to stop writing about Buffy now, otherwise this will turn into a Yahtzee style rant, and I can’t talk as quickly as him.

As far as the second part of the title goes, I’m hungry. There’s a reason for this - I’m on a diet. There’s a reason for this too - I’m overweight. There’s probably a reason for this too, but as this isn’t a psychology essay we’ll skip that bit.

So, having decided to lose some weight I’m hungry. I still eat, don’t get me wrong, but now I eat food that’s not fun or filling. Food has gone from a pleasure to a nasty, low fat, low calorie, high fibre chore. And it doesn’t even fill me up.

I’d love to say I’ve given up drinking and smoking too, but I need those to cope with my boring diet.