Choices

"Please forgive him. He only drinks to forget."

I remember a time when I used to watch every even vaguely scifi show going. For the rest of the week I'd read in the evenings.

Babylon 5 was a revolution: TV space opera that wasn't Star Trek! The X-Files spearheaded the rise of 'cult TV' to become a sufficiently broad church as to outnumber all of the non-cult shows and usher in the ingenuous catchall term 'genre programming', as if mainstream programming didn't have a genre at all.

But the world has changed since 1990, and as the percentage of space remaining on my Sky box plunges towards single digits once again and with Amazon Prime's offerings lagging - the excellent Mr Robot and diverting Into the Badland unfinished, and The Man in the High Castle not yet begun - it's time to face the facts: I can't watch everything, and that means that hard choices - well, choices anyway - have to be made.

The main Japanese character in this series is actually called 'Katana Girl'.
There's an aspect of not trying here.

The X-Files revival didn't make it past the first episode for me, and I'll remind you that I'm still watching The Shannara Chronicles. In a similar vein, it seems likely that I won't be going back to Heroes Reborn, although I've not yet deleted it. Much like The X-Files, I think my problem is that I didn't see the last series of Heroes - I basically got fucked off with them killing off characters I liked in order to focus on the amazing Peter, the unsinkable Sylar and the latest incarnation of interchangeable hot blonde - and I simply can't be bothered to go back and catch up on the backstory that I'm missing. Also, despite the removal of my major bugbears from the series, they're still killing off characters I like.

Channel 4's Humans was a tougher call, but it had got to the point that I wasn't going to have anything new to say about it. If I get a chance I may binge it as a box set, but for now it's on the back burner. True Detective season 2 is looking like going the same way - it's as nasty as Season 1, but nowhere near as compelling - although I still hope to get back to Dominion at some point.

I figure if I want American fascists, I'll go to The Man in the High Castle.

More recently, I've decided that I'm still watching Blindspot, but not reviewing it (as with The Blacklist and Elementary I'm not sure I have enough to say, but may do a write up for the season once I finish.) New series Colony failed to grab me; likewise event miniseries 11 22 63, largely because JFK is almost as spent a time travel focus as Hitler, but without the comforting moral absolutism conferred by Nazis. It is my contention that literally everyone in Dallas on that day was a time traveler, probably including JFK who had to be cloned and taken back to replace his original self after he died from temporal wear and tear. 11 22 63 is also based on a Stephen King story, and I've never really been into King's work.

'But wait,' I hear you say. 'Are these things really worse than The Shannara Chronicles or Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands?' Probably not, but I find them less entertaining, and less fun to write about. I personally feel that this is a sure sign of a golden age of entertainment - that we no longer feel pressured to watch things just because they're good.

I leave you with this thought: In Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End - which I only recently read after the broadcast of the event adaptation - a character bewails the fact that in the Golden Age of Humanity, people are so indolent that they are watching anything up to three hours of television per day.