I’m a pop culture junkie, so in America that means lots of television. The real problem with television these days is the same problem with pretty much everything else — there’s just so much good television out there, that it’s difficult to decide which shows not to watch.
My favorite television phenomenon is the season finale (and, in one case this year, a series finale). A series finale, of course, generally must have some sort of finality, whereas a normal season finale usually throws everything up in the air to make sure you’ll tune in next season. I only seriously followed three shows this year.
The following contains spoilers:
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. I never watched an episode of this show at all until last October. Now, it’s on almost constantly at my house on DVD (and thanks to FX I managed to catch up on the previous six years over a few months of viewing). The series finale wasn’t anything special, but it did what a series finale should do — but a nice bookend to the series, resolve one of the major conflicts, but at the same time leave plenty of room for any future spinoffs, movies, what have you. Joss Whedon’s brilliant, this is the best TV show ever, etc., etc., and I can’t wait to watch it over and over on DVD.
Smallville: Easily the best genre show on television — an excellent retelling of the Superman mythology especially now that they’ve recast Kal El’s trip to Earth as an alien invasion. I’ll be tuning in to find if Lex survives and how Clark handles tripping out on red kryponite next season. Tres cool. (I almost feel sorry that Star Trek: Enterprise’s ratings are going to drop even more one it has to go head-to-head with Smallville . . . wait a minute, no I don’t!)
The Shield: I keep tuning into The Shield hoping that it will finally start to suck so I can stop watching it, but damn if they don’t keep churning out the best cop show I can remember watching. And I liked the finale’s decision to not try to sucker the viewer in for next season but rather resolving one of the plot points and giving the characters a few moments of screen time to favor their achievement (which admittedly was the theft of millions of dollars, but still . . .) Michael Chickliss and his corrupt anti-hero get all of the attention, but it is the way that the writers balance Chickliss’ escapades with the stories of cops who run the gamut from honest and effective to dishonst and incompetent that keeps the whole corrupt cop gig from turning into a parody.