Leverage
Day 4 out after ankle surgery, and I’m watching Leverage on DVR, mainly because this guy (who wrote this) is one of the executive producers. I’ve been reading Kung Fu Monkey for years – ever since Crazification Factor, and it’s been fun trying to figure out from the blog who John Rogers is and what he does because he does so many different things. I mean, Transformers, Blue Beetle, looks like he worked on the Cosby Show, and for the longest time I thought he was Yet Another Hilarious Liberal Blogger, one who didn’t post very often.
It’s been interesting watching Leverage, because I don’t watch much TV. After all John’s posts on TV series sausage-making, I was curious how the show would turn out. I was hugely disappointed by the first episode, which lays some pipe on how the group gets together, none of which I bought. Not the characters, not the relationships, not the story, nada. It was all so quick, so shallow, so idiot-driven, that I couldn’t take it seriously. “Television shows,” I said to myself, and didn’t watch further. It took until I was laid up with the ankle to watch some of the episodes recorded since, and now I’m kinda hooked, and now I get it. TV shows RELY on the fact that you’re coming back next week. There’s no way they can do setting, characters, and plot in one short show, especially with all the commercials they have to show.
And, tentacles, do they show a lot of commercials. If there were no DVR, I’d never be able to watch the sucker. Even on fast fast-forward, the commercial breaks are almost more than I can stand. And – memo to TV industry DVR haters – I still know what every one of them is for. You watch the commercials REALLY intently when you’re FF’ing to make sure that you don’t skip over the next bit of show.
