My Newest Crush

I’m completely in love. With Netflix.

Now, I realize I’m late to the party. My mother had a Netflix account for several years, which she recently canceled, “because no one will ever come watch movies” with her. (Amazing with the guilt, that one.) I had never been that eager to sign up, in part because I’m much more of a television person than a movie person. And I enjoy network television. It keeps me busy, enough so that I canceled my HBO a few years ago, after an unpleasant incident separated me from “The Sopranos.”

Which is not that network television always works out the way I would like. I totally sympathize with the lament that “Sometimes, Fox just isn’t that into me” . For example, my own relationship with the CW network has been chilly for months. And lately, I feel like I’ve been dumped by the broadcast networks as a whole. “It’s not you, it’s me... actually, it’s not even me, it’s the writers’ strike!”

Just when I was really beginning to get over the loss of favorites like “Veronica Mars” and “Gilmore Girls” with the help of new favorites like “Moonlight” and “Pushing Daisies”, the television season ground to an untimely halt due to the Writers’ Guild of America going on strike. I still have mixed feelings about the strike itself, but I do know that it has left me bored, and a little bereft, not to mention worried about favorites like “Scrubs” and “Smallville”, which are set to end this year and may or may not get a proper sendoff.

Figuring (correctly) that I would be bored as new episodes trickled off into nothing, I finally thought about signing up with Netflix to catch up on movies that we had missed. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that they stocked quite a lot of television DVDs as well. After talking it over with EAToo, we decided, in an effort to make lemonade out of lemons, to sign up and catch up on a few television series that we had never gotten around to. So far, in the last month or so, we have been through the first season each of “House” and “Bones”, both of which I had watched occasionally this season.

We had watched the pilot of “Bones” when it first aired — having been die-hard fans of “Angel” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, we wanted to like it, if only because it stars David Boreanaz. I still can’t remember why we thought we had better things to watch at the time. Granted, “Bones” isn’t for everyone, and there are enough morgue scenes that I certainly would not recommend watching it during dinner. But if you can get past that sort of thing, the show is everything a drama should be — beautifully produced, incredibly well-acted, engaging, topical without being preachy or biased, and downright funny at times. For a show that appears, on the surface, to be totally plot-driven (complete with a body-of-the-week), “Bones” is, deep down, a fascinating, layered character study, and I can’t wait to see more.

I will have to wait, though, because next up on my queue is the second season of “House”. I had avoided “House” for several reasons — it seemed repetitive, I was long-since burnt out on medical dramas, it aired opposite “Veronica Mars” — but all that changed last October. I was flipping channels, waiting for EAToo to finish some movie about electric cars that a co-worker had lent him, and landed on an episode of “House”. With nothing better to do, I started to watch, and found myself alternately enthralled, grossed out, and laughing out loud. It’s true that every episode features an impossible-to-diagnose case, and mostly the team gets it wrong several times before they get it right. But the cases, and by extension the show itself, are never really about the medical mystery. It’s always about the people, both those we get to know a little better every week and those who come briefly into the hospital never to be seen again, just like in real life.

So, after a lifetime of on-and-off relationships with networks that sometimes just weren’t that into me, I have finally found someone I can really depend on. I think my new relationship with Netflix is the start of a beautiful friendship. Sure, the early bloom of our relationship has been based on “House” and “Bones”, but even after those days are behind us, I expect to bond over countless other television shows and movies. Maybe even “The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries” from the ‘70s, if I can convince EAToo. (Did I mention that I’m a geek?)

And maybe I’ll even be able to share dinner with Netflix someday — just not until I’m done with “House” and “Bones”.

Starting Over

It’s official. I hate myself.

When I started this blog, last September, I was determined to never be That Person. You know the one. That Person, who starts a blog, uses up a perfectly good blog name that no one else can ever have, posts twice, then disappears. It irritated me, especially when I was starting the blog and saw all the good blog names I could never use because some teenager had wasted them posting a couple of times about how life is so boring. And unfair. (See, for example, this one. On second thought, don’t. That’s several minutes of your life you’ll never get back.)

Of course, as always happens when you say, “I’ll never...”, I became That Person. It’s entirely my fault; I should have known better than to start a project at the very beginning of my busy season at work, with the holidays close behind to boot. As they say, life got in the way.

So here I am again, ready to start over. Hopefully, this time I won’t be That Person. And, hopefully, I’ll also collect some interested readers to help me keep going.