How I survived the TV strike

I’m a bit of a TV nut.  So, like so many of you, I had to go through a bit of an adjustment this winter without any new installments of Lost, The Office, and all my other TV pals.

How did I survive?  DVDs, my friends.  God bless ‘em.

Here’s just a sampling of the Digital Video Devicey goodness that I enjoyed over the past few months:

I.  Futurama: Bender’s Big Score – There aren’t a lot of shows (only Firefly and Arrested Development come to mind) whose cancellation burned me more than that of Futurama.  My goodness I loved this show. I still remember the moment when I first understood that this Matt Groening creation was a thing of awesome beauty and genius.  It was season two’s episode “I Second That Emotion,” (that’s the one where the Professor installs an empathy chip in Bender), in which it was revealed that the colony of underground mutants (long story) worshipped an unexploded nuclear bomb but, as one of the mutants commented, “its really just a Christmas and Easter” thing.  Any show that makes Beneath the Planet of the Apes jokes (that’s where the whole mutants-worshipping-an-unexploded-nuclear-bomb thing comes from) without care as to the tiny amount of viewers who would actually get that joke is a show that guaranteed itself my viewership until the end of time.  Anyways, this DVD movie was the 1st of 4 DVDs rescuing the show from oblivion.  It’s the bees’ knees, baby.

II.  Battlestar Galactica: Razor – Another direct-to-DVD continuation of a brilliant TV show.  If you’re not watching Sci-Fi’s stunningly amazing reinvention of BSG, then I have only pity in my heart for you.  This installment was, no surprise, gripping and surprising…in particular, the multi-layered structure of flashbacks-within-flashbacks was super-cool.  And we got to see a young William “Husker” Adama battling “toasters” in the First Cylon War!

III.  Zodiac – I totally missed this David Fincher film, about the real-life Zodiac murders of the 60’s & 70’s, when it was in theatres…and I don’t know quite what prompted me to pick it up on DVD.  But I found this film to be completely gripping.  A terrific cast,  including Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Junior, and many many other familiar faces really kept things moving.  And the beautiful set design & costuming combined with some really beautiful but extraordinarily subtle visual effects work brought San Francisco through the years to gorgeous visual life.

IV.  Igby Goes Down – Check out this cast:  Kieran Culkin, Clare Danes, Jeff Goldblum, Amanda Peet, Ryan Phillipe, Bill Pullman, and Susan Sarandon.  Find it.  Watch it.  You won’t regret it.

More DVDS I watched and loved this winter coming tomorrow!